I’m now reflecting on it a little over a year after The Straw That Broke the Camel’s Back.

Our affair started with a little innocent fooling around while I was in college.  Take an education class or two, teach a lesson here and there.  Then it intensified with student teaching.  As a physics teacher I got to play with toys in front of an audience!  And the audience, at least some of it, really seemed to like it!  And some times I got that special rush that comes with seeing the light bulb come on.

That feeling, the feeling of kids “getting it,” is what I imagine a hit of heroin might be like.  The shiver that ran down my spine; that look of appreciation and understanding; and especially when a kid could do something worthwhile that he or she couldn’t do before.

It turns out I was being deceived and deceiving myself at almost every turn.  In my last few years as a professor, I routinely had course evaluations telling me that mine was the best class they’d ever taken.  But I also routinely had students weeping in my office, unfairly dealing with my love’s capricious heart; unfairly dealing with the reality that, on its face, teaching is simply a bad idea; and unfairly dealing with the fickleness of who evaluates you.

It seems that at the ends of the continuum, the system works pretty well.  In the early grades, I learned to read and write and add and subtract.   In graduate school, I learned to analyze and craft an argument (and, I think, to read and write much better).  In between the ends I learned a great deal, but most of that learning came by doing and you don’t really do things that matter in classroom settings.

You mostly sit still.

Thus, most of us leave formal schooling knowing how to sit still, and to read and write and there isn’t much else that most of us know.  We’ve all been taught about geometry, evolution and the Civil War.  We’ve been taught many of these things many, many times.  But if you scratch through the surface understandings, you won’t find much underneath.  In spite of being taught the so-called scientific method over and over and over again, few adults think scientifically.  In spite of being taught over and over again about diet and exercise most of us are fat.

I’d learned in graduate school to look critically at the system and at the individuals within it.  For most of my twenty years in teaching, I’d not only been passionate about teaching, but also about the study of teaching and learning.  That study led me to understand that global warming had led glacial change to exceed academic change and, therefore, it was time for me to change direction.

I’d worked for most of my twenty years in the profession trying to make schools better.   Joining the faculty at a new charter school, I wished to make better schools.  I had an epiphany there that led me to want to make something better than schools.  And that epiphany ended my twenty-year romance with teaching.

And left me feeling alone in my new paradigm.

Standing there, in a room with 25 teenagers, trying to get them to think about why convection matters,*  it hit me that teaching is a fundamentally bad idea.  I don’t mean (just) a bad idea for me.  I mean a bad idea.

Put aside for a moment what you know about schools and focus on how you came to understand the things you understand most deeply and remember too what you know about kids.  Now, imagine someone suggesting the following:

Hey!  I’ve got a great idea!  Why don’t we put 25 teenagers in room together for an hour and have them listen to a single adult tell them about the Magna Carta!  And then, have them move down the hall and listen to someone else tell them about parabolas!  And then how heating causes expansion!  Isn’t that a great idea!  We could have them do something like this hour after hour after hour, day after day after day, year after year!  We could put 2000 fifteen to eighteen year-olds in a building!

Clearly, that’s just not a good idea.  I think I realized that when I was a teenager, but had managed to suppress that realization until I was faced with the realities of school in a new way.  I’m convinced that we’ll look back in another 20 or 30 years and be shocked that we did this to damn near everybody, much as we look back now on the horrors of segregation in America 30 and more years ago.

So, the affair is over and I’m trying to figure out how to move on.  I still have the things I learned from years of studying the system.  The creative destruction of my conceptual framework is both creative and destructive.  I’m saddened by my loss, but hopeful about the future.

I raise my question about what to do next in a way clearly derived from the way the system has made me think – an SAT analogy question:

Typewriters are to computers as schools are to: ________________.

I have ideas about how to complete the analogy, but I can’t do it alone.  I need partners in my paradigm.  Who will join me?

*Yes, convection really matters.

I’d promised quite some time ago to get back to this general idea and to share my hunches about what might go on the blank.  I don’t think it will be something simple enough to fit on a single blank, though if a term is crafted for the class of institutions and experiences then we might have something.

I see the educational system as akin to the ecosphere.  As the ecosphere is made of countless interconnected ecosystems, the edusphere is made of countless interconnected eduspheres.  That’s already the way it is, of course, but let’s be mightily presumptuous and rebrand.  Presumptuousness is a strength and I should, after all, go with my strengths.

What might different edusystems look like?

• Schools actually do work ok for some minority of kids, so they’ll linger on.
• Homeschooling is already on the scene and making a growing difference in the edusphere.
• Apprenticeships are proven to work pretty well for different vocations.  I expect that there will be some broadening of apprenticeship that will not only spread to other occupations but also to non-vocational use.  How, for example, do we (or should we) apprentice citizenship?
• Microschools. What?  Eh, I don’t like the name either, but it’s the best I’ve come up with so far.  This would be groups of something like 10 or 20 students with some range of ages where they would have a van or two and would go out and explore the world.  It would need to go beyond simply looking, but also making sense of the world and reporting about it to others.

I could go on at some length about microschools, but will save that for an a later post.  I want to hear more from other folks.

Last night in thinking more about the end of school, it occurred to me that it’s in certain ways akin to current bursting of the real estate bubble and the earlier bursting of the dotcom bubble. Things generally don’t inflate forever.

Of course the U.S. military budget (and the overall U.S. budget and debt) are unlikely to expand forever. We know the same kinds of expansions came to a close for both Great Britain in the early 20th century and the Soviet Union at the end of that same century.

What are the things I’m talking about inflating related to the end of school?

Well, college tuition is one. These costs simply cannot rise forever. A second is the overall inflation of academic credentials. And grade inflation. At some point there will be corrections in all of these areas. A tuition correction will come when a better way to learn becomes obvious to the masses. (Or when we have complete economic collapse). I think the popping of the tuition bubble will be simultaneous with a burst in the inflating bubble of credential inflation. Of course, not all inflating things burst. Some may stabilize instead of explode. I think that’s more likely if people foresee the coming change.

Other examples? Some things inflate for an incredibly long time – like the human population. The population bubble will either burst catastrophically or gradually stabilize. That clearly depends on whether we’re smart as a population or not so smart (or if our leaders are smart and effective). Our track record isn’t so encouraging here, but last night I started reading Common Wealth, Jeffery Sachs’ new book. It appears to offer some hope for us.

One more: the healthcare bubble will either burst catastrophically or stabilize.

I think the analogy has legs. I invite you to either strengthen those legs or break them. Are there things that inflate forever? Are any of them human constructs? Are the things that seem to be forever inflating really endless or is it just that we can’t yet understand what will make them stabilize or pop?  Is the edusphere like the stock market — in the long term it grows and grows and grows, but are there periods where it shrinks in the shorter term?  I don’t know.

Again I ask, what do you think?